Power of Suggestion

Today I weighed myself first thing in the morning. Ever since I pumped up the volume of exercise I’ve been doing, I started weighing myself just to keep track of how I was doing. That was quite a while back, almost 6 months ago. And like I mentioned in this post, I’ve managed to whittle my weight down to 58kg from 63.0.

More recently, as I decided to stop exercising since I’m going to need some protective blubber for the baby anyway, I’ve been slowly but surely creeping back up towards the 60 mark.

Today however, throws a lot of doubt on this whole entire shindig. I weighted 58.2kg today.

That’s like back to square 1. What the devil is going on here.

Now people will normally say that it’s ok for your weight to fluctuate a few kg on a regular basis, don’t worry it’s normal, blah blah blah… Yeah, I get that, but for all purposes of the blog post and because I”m such an over-thinker, let’s just say that I feel affected by the possibilities, and let’s just try and dissect a little of what it could mean.

Anyway, John and I have decided that once the pee stick confirms everything, we’ll start posting daily weight so that we’ll have a rough guage of how much watermelon is coming out the orange hole. I know that a lot of the weight is actually water weight and fat, but I’m sure I can google guesstimates that would help to mentally prepare me for the torture that is to come when I near the labour pangs.

But back to story proper.

It’s hard to say what I’m really feeling when I see my weight this morning precisely because we haven’t confirmed anything and we don’t have a definitive that I truly am pregnant even though my period still hasn’t made an appearance.. Safe to say if I am pregnant, I’m barely even a month in since my period was due 5th May and we’re like… 2 weeks more before it even smells like June.

It’s still worrying though.

There is actually a fair amount of medical phenomenon having to do with one’s body being tricked into thinking that it’s pregnant when it’s actually NOT. It called a False Pregnancy or a pseudocyesis which literally broken down is pseudo-pregnancy.

Taken this from WebMD:When a woman feels an intense desire to get pregnant, which may be because of infertility, repeat miscarriages, impending menopause, or a desire to get married, her body may produce some pregnancy signs (such as a swollen belly, enlarged breasts, and even the sensation of fetal movement). The woman’s brain then misinterprets those signals as pregnancy, and triggers the release of hormones (such as estrogen and prolactin) that lead to actual pregnancy symptoms.

That’s really quite freaky. Phantom Foetus… *shiver* that’s a Japanese horror flick right there. (I totally wanted to post something from Ju-on, but I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the search results, much less post it here to freak all of you out. You’ll all have to settle with Dorothy Gale.)

On the opposite end of the coin and a bit out of the topic is the program “Secretly Pregnant” on Discovery Home & Health. Write up for this show is :

Secretly Pregnant looks at the lives of women who are, for various reasons, keeping their pregnancies a secret. What happens when a woman becomes pregnant, and must use every means conceivable to hide the pregnancy? How do they cope in potentially explosive situations that could get them disowned, evicted, abandoned or fired?

Like SERIOUSLY? These people manage to keep their pregnancies ENTIRELY secret for the majority of the gestation. That is either super nuts, or some damn good camouflaging right thurr.

But back to my brain convincing my body that it is pregnant when it’s not, apparently guys can get it too. In that case it’s more like a sympathetic pregnancy or the Couvade Syndrome.

I don’t suppose I’m really having a Pseudo pregnancy just because my weight has not been steady. But I am just throwing ideas out there since I don’t have the final confirmation for it yet. At the end of the day, it’s really a lot of speculation and over thinking. And stress tends to make the body go haywire and do crazy things, like make your period late.

For now, I’ll just watch my weight and try not to be so critical of minor changes.

But all that above being considered, in the process of writing out this post, being kiasu (scared to lose out), I went to get myself some pregnancy test kits to get ready for the day when I go pee pee with all the anticipation of the future of my next 9 months. But more on that on the day itself.